Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Good Life (La Dolce Vita)

It's good to teach the world's fortunate people from time to time, if only to shame their pride for a single moment. Because there are higher forms of happiness than theirs, on a grander scale, and more delicate.

~ Baudelaire, "Parisian Melancholia"

One of the reasons I love to travel is to have my badly-battered faith in humanity restored by coming in contact with other cultures. It does my cynical heart good to know that there is still hope in the world, if not in this country. Yes, the rest of the world can offer us much, but perhaps the most important thing they can do is force us to take a good look at ourselves. Americans can be an ugly lot when representing this country abroad, as residents of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada are probably finding out all too well these days. We really need to chill and stop looking at everyone and everything in materialistic terms. I think it would do wonders for our collective psyche and individual psyches for a sea change to occur in our way of thinking.

Let me offer one example from my own experience. Many years ago I attended a conference/tourist junket to Rio de Janiero. There were lavish lunches and dinners, a hotel rooftop pool, and pulsating nightlife excursions which are de rigueur for these types of trips. But the thing I took the most joy from and which I recall most fondly of all my time there was an afternoon of playing frisbee and volleyball with local kids hanging out at the beach. There was a human connection there that was so simple and pure, a familial bonding with people I had never met before and didn't know me or want anything from me besides a moment of camaraderie. Yet this was a feeling totally lacking from the circle of associates that I was travelling with. It made me look at myself in terms of what my value system had become under the influence of American society. It shook me out of my comfort zone and into questioning what I had accomplished in real terms, human terms...which is the only yardstick we should be using to measure our progress. That experience always stuck with me and continues to define my belief that a much better world is possible if enough of us "ugly Americans" would spend more time looking in the mirror.

4 comments:

Well stated, Ernesto. I'm not sure how much I can add by way of a response that would capture the essence of your experience better than the following words:

"There was a human connection there that was so simple and pure, a familial bonding with people I had never met before and didn't know me or want anything from me besides a moment of camaraderie."

Yet, here is something to ponder. Consider this: Were it not for your cynicism, seeing your world here in the United States compressed into material terms, those experiences that have "bady-battered [your] faith in humanity," do you think you would have experienced the moment you described this way--

"But the thing I took the most joy from and which I recall most fondly of all my time there was an afternoon of playing frisbee and volleyball with local kids hanging out at the beach."

--with the same exquisite purity and joy? With the same depth of understanding and insight? With the same transformative certainty? With the same adherence to personal truth?

And this: How do you think these kids would fare, if, suddenly, they were thrust into your world?

"...do you think you would have experienced the moment--with the same exquisite purity and joy? With the same depth of understanding and insight? With the same transformative certainty? With the same adherence to personal truth?"

I've wondered that very thing and have imagined myself in a society where such moments were commonplace. I don't think it would get old or mundane just because it was no longer so unusual. These moments are what I believe we as a race were evolved to be part of. The social construct that we currently live in is not natural. It flies in the face of our evolved humanity. That is why there is so much drug addiction and violence in this society.

"How do you think these kids would fare, if, suddenly, they were thrust into your world?"

The trip I took down there was in 1992, shortly before the Earth Summit, at a time when the Brazilian government was rounding up many of these "street children" and either relocating or killing them, with the goal of hiding the problem of rampant poverty from the rest of the world. So Brazil at that time was not much different from the United States, except here we are content with letting the underclass kill themselves off, or housing them below sea level so a hurricane storm surge will do the job.

Brazil had a long history from 1964 and into the 1990s of brutal repression, much of it with the tacit approval of the United States. We supported militarily and encouraged ideologically their dictatorships and war against any efforts at alleviating the grinding poverty. William Blum documents much of it in his book "Killing Hope".

Whenever these facts are cited, the rightwingers will always either 1. try to downplay or deny the U.S. were involved to the extent claimed, and/or 2. try to justify it by citing the Cold War mentality of "with us or against us" resurrected by Bush.

The simple fact is there are no justifications for these types of crimes, although they haven't been actively prosecuted since Nuremberg because of our position as "leader of the free world".